


you left me in the dark

by silverscream



Category: All Souls Trilogy - Deborah Harkness
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Pain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-15
Updated: 2017-04-15
Packaged: 2018-10-19 01:05:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10628952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silverscream/pseuds/silverscream
Summary: Have some lovely haunting, y'all. If you think Philippe does not talk to Ysabeau day in and day out as a ghost then you are wrong. I thought of adding this to "eden sank to grief", but that's supposed to be a happy-ish story, so i'll keep it that way.Regardless of that, do tell me what you thought of this! Cheers x





	

_"What are you up to, love?"_

 

She passes by him, deaf to his words, blind to the inquisitive nature of his gaze.

 

He lounges by the great wooden desk, both sitting and floating, head supported by an immaterial arm. Not that Ysabeau would know to look. Not that she would even see him, were she to look.

 

She is frightfully small, he realised sometime into his ironic immortality. Maybe this is what they meant when saying there is no such thing as rest for the wicked.

 

Watching his wife waste away to little more than a walking shadow is one of the things that almost makes him believe cursing the powers beyond will amount to anything.

 

She is tiny, a thing he had always been somewhat aware of, but her size was usually- had been usually tempered by her presence, which more than made up the difference.

 

His eyes close in remembrance; the air would stop in his lungs, his palms would sweat and his eyes would all the more drink her in, when she unleashed that sort of wild charisma onto whatever poor being ended up as her prey.

 

He would get drunk on her presence and, later, maybe fall to his knees before her, kiss up the insides of her knees, her muscled thighs, he would whisper adorations into her pale skin; the curl of her lips divine in the darkness of some chamber they happened upon.

 

But now, now she is small, her hands tremble when they gather a shawl or a quilt around herself.

 

" _Cold, lady?_ " he asks, conversation always a dreary monologue, these days. She makes no sign of having heard him, and, even though he knew it would be so, something in Philippe's non-existent heart still chips away.

 

She stares at the wall behind him, feet perched underneath her on that sofa, a fire stoked into the hearth and a steaming cup of tea, her favourite brew, no doubt, sitting on an ornate, if small, table, courtesy of Marthe.

 

Ysabeau pays no heed to any of these things, though. Philippe sighs at the same time a log cracks in the fireplace. 

 

He fancies it is his noise she looks up at, jumping a moment into her own skin. Philippe wraps himself around her, nothing more than hot air, nothing less than empty matter.

 

" _Come now, Ysabeau_ ," he nearly begs, his voice cracking, " _your tea grows cold, and you so hate cold things. Drink it while it can warm you still."_

 

She is dressed in light tones again, today. Off-white wool, an earthy grey and some beige, an artificial colour that turns the gold in her hair into brittle yellow. She's not seen the sun in days, if not weeks, his wife, and her skin grows parchment thin.

 

It is almost translucent, not a trace of those freckles he used to kiss and count to be found on her.

 

 _"Ysabeau?_ " he whispers into the gaunt shape of her cheekbone, a question awaiting no answer. _"Ysabeau_ ," he says again, hoping from the bottom of his soul- ha, all that is left of him - that somehow, this time she'll turn into the shadow of his touch, if only now, if only once. 

 

His wife gathers her knees, all skin and bones, to her chest, rests her too-sharp chin on them and stares into the fire.

 

There is nothing in her eyes, and that scares Philippe badly. Very badly. He whispers in her ear, he prays to every god he has ever heard of, he holds her tight to a body that no longer exists and gods, curse it all, she is still the same.

 

 

The same wild, feral creature that had returned to Sept Tours nigh on two years ago, covered in blood, red, dried and dripping down her chin, her cheeks, down the gashes in her chest and arms and legs.

 

Since then, he has watched the meat slowly melt away from her form, leaving only bone and thinly stretched skin over her arms and legs and belly.

 

Ysabeau does not eat. Not regularly, at least. Marthe will bring her blood everyday unfailingly; and some days his wife will put her cracked lips to the edge of a cup, and shudder as she takes tiny sips, Philippe's ghost hands tangled with her own, or holding her frame, and she will murmur to Marthe something akin to a thank you.

 

Others, she will stare past the cup, unseeing, let it sit near her for hours, turn around and curl into some quilt, flinching at even Marthe's kindness, or not answering at all.

 

And she wears white, gods in heaven, she wears white each day, which makes Philippe want to claw out his eyes. She looks tiny and ashen. There is no light in her now, and she turns to little and less before his very eyes.

 

He'd never believed in redemption or punishment after death, even at his worst, not like the Christians did, but this; watching the love of his life waste away before his very eyes, day after day after day, unable to do anything more than stare and pass his hands through her knobbly knees and sharp cheeks, this was his very own personal brand of hell, and he had a feeling the gods were laughing at him.

 

He remembers little of dying, even less of the pain before it. Perchance he even regrets it, oh, he regrets it so bitterly, because pain is a constant now. If he cannot lay a hand on anything, if he cannot even whisper to his wife, if he can only scream to the walls day in and day out as the home he has built- the home they have built slowly turns into a ruin, if he is anything but real, then why does feeling still burn so bright inside him? 

 

Why can he not breathe when he looks at her, why does his heart rise in his throat at the glimpse of one of his children, coming home to stare at his wife in pity, why does anger blind him and regret suffocate him?!

 

_What use is a heart if he is dead and buried?_

 

A small noise makes him startle, and he looks up from where he sits. Ysabeau's thin fingers are wrapped gingerly around the teacup, bringing it on a trembling voyage to her lips. He smiles as she sips, closing her eyes against the warmth of it. 

 

She is always cold, and he remembers it being one of his personal amusements, her freezing toes and her pouting mouth when she nudged closer during winter, answering with cheek when he teased her about it. Now there is nothing, it seems, that truly warms her, even if Marthe tries to comfort her.

 

Bless her heart, the old woman tries, and her patience would turn even a saint green with envy. She raises Ysabeau from bed every morning, talking softly all the while in a language or another, recounting some story or humming some sound, avoiding those that make Ysabeau flinch or tighten her grip around an innocent object, hard enough for it to break. Marthe then turns quiet, changes the tune and gathers the shards from around Ysabeau.

Those she cringes at were mostly the songs he had sung for her throughout the millennia, and even as he suffers for it, Philippe hopes with his entire soul she will somehow forget. Forget his existence and live, damn her.

 

He does not want to know a world without her, he does not know how he would bear it, but rather she be free of it all than this grief. The grief eating away at her, bit by bit, until all that is left of the glorious, wild and vivid heart that was his Ysabeau is this white shadow.

 

Someone perhaps is chuckling at the irony, somewhere in this world, that he was the one to die and Ysabeau the one to turn into a ghost, but he only feels the need to hit something, to be heard in his frustration by something other than the old ghosts in Sept Tours, who are more just memories of a memory than anything else, specks of dust in the hallways, invisible even to him were the sun to not cross through them precisely when he looked.

 

He wonders if he'll become like them, too, in time; if it is him that will, too, slowly ebb away to nothing. It seems to be the fate of most things he has loved, that. His children squabbling amongst themselves, his land ravaged by a war he could not win, the love of his life hollow and mute and him incapable of doing anything to stop it.

 

Ysabeau lays her cup down gingerly, drawing the quilt closer to herself, shuddering in spite of it. Then, her eyes turn to him.

 

A heartbeat echoes through him at that, his eyes widen, _gods, gods, gods, she is looking-_

 

" _Ysabeau_?"

 

  - _through him_. He deflates, bitter tears caught in his throat, caught in his lashes, then free on his face.

 

 Philippe sits in the same place he used to when alive, like a memory, a memory of all those times they read books on some sofa, perched on its ends, her feet in his lap, or she herself in his arms, her reading and rasping softly, him mouthing the words into the skin of her throat.

 

He watches her, now, and she scoots closer to the pillow at his back, lies down on it, and, where he real, she would be in his arms. Close enough, that, and still, so impossibly far away. 

 

He combs his fingers through her hair, singing softly to her, and maybe, as she falls asleep, she dreams of him.

 

He wishes she would not.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Have some lovely haunting, y'all. If you think Philippe does not talk to Ysabeau day in and day out as a ghost then you are wrong. I thought of adding this to "eden sank to grief", but that's supposed to be a happy-ish story, so i'll keep it that way.
> 
> Regardless of that, do tell me what you thought of this! Cheers x


End file.
